#RPGaDay: Day 1

1. What published RPG do you wish you were playing right now?

Answer: There's really not just one answer to some of these questions. However, I'm getting to run a game in Basic Fantasy RPG in a few weeks. I've been building up to running this for a few years now so it's the game I'm most excited about right now.

For me, BFRPG is the best system I've ever seen. It's a concise, well-written, and well-organized set of rules that happen to align with the way I like to play the game. It's a rulings over rules type of play, and there's very little that I'll need to house rule. It's facelessness or generic quality is a detriment for some, but for me, it just means there's less flavor that I need to scrape off before I add my own. The only things in the core rules are what's necessary to play, and I can add whatever else I care to on top really easily. Finally, it's basically given away for free as a PDF with art or sold at cost online for $5.00. It's not a product delivered by a corporation to turn a profit. It's a game designed by gamers for gamers as a labor of love. It's a community built on the ethos of open contribution and sharing.

All that said, I've also recently purchased Lamentations of the Flame Princess and the Red and Pleasant Land supplement, so I'm stoked to try that. I've got Whitehack, Delving Deeper, and Whitebox on their way too and all of those look great as well. I watched a Dark Age of Role Playing video on White Star the other day and I could see myself getting into that. Too many games to play and buy, not enough time.

Return to Brookmere

My beginning.

Welcome to my new blog where I discuss all my random thoughts about RPGs. I've named it after the fourth Endless Quest book with the same name as this post. It was my entry point into Dungeons & Dragons. After reading this at seven, I bugged my parents to buy me the Moldvay Basic box set. I took it home and quickly realized it was beyond me. We returned it to the store.

Fast forward to three years later, the summer of 1985. I tried again with the Mentzer Basic red box. This time it took. I became obsessed. My friends and I played a combination of BECMI with 1e AD&D options added in for the next few years. I flirted with Gamma World, Star Frontiers, MERP, and some others, but I was chiefly D&D.

High school came and so did second edition. I was starting to get more into skateboarding and music and role playing took a back seat. The artwork became more stylized and the mechanics started getting complicated so I stopped playing. I kept checking in on the hobby through the years, occasionally sitting in on a one-shot with friends. I bought old modules second-hand and checked out the new books as they came out. I even bought the re-skinned 2e books before WotC swooped in and saved D&D, creating 3e, d20, and the OGL. I bought the 3.5 core books when un-smart people sold when 4e came out. I even bought the 4e starter or basic box to test the waters. I gave it to a friend after quickly determining it wasn't for me (Dragonborn? Seriously?).

Marriage and fatherhood pushed a lot to the side, but one day looking for old modules online I heard about the OSR games coming out. I ran across Basic Fantasy browsing on Amazon and I bought it because it looked good and was cheap. When it came, I started getting excited because here was something I related to. It took a few years for my kids to grow up enough to find the time to go over it in depth.

A few months ago we built new bookcases in our new house and we finally had a place to put all of our books which had been in boxes since our move. In pulling out the RPGs (which I tended to do a couple of times a year), I decided I wanted to start gaming again. The last month or so has been a whirlwind of discovery of the OSR games I've missed out on while I was gone.

Maybe this will be shortlived, or maybe I'm grasping at something from my youth to comfort me in a warm glow of nostalgia as I get older. Either way, I'm enjoying myself and I refuse to feel bad about that.

I plan to post random thoughts on the games I own, responses to video channels I've subscribed to, and hopefully the new games I'll be playing. I'm wordy and nerdy, but I'll try to keep the excessive verbiage to a minimum. I'm also starting this at the beginning of RPGaDay month, so I'll be hopefully keeping up with daily posts all this month.

Thanks for visiting, and stay tuned.